Actually, the US Postal Service has a list of standard abbreviations for use with postal addressing, at least in the US. What I did was to create a set of regexes for those, so as they set now they just consist of the regexes and the common abbreviations they refer to, in a form I could generate the tests from. I haven't put them into a more usable form yet, due in part to a lack of to-its.

(Right now, it is a set of hashes with the key being the abbreviation, with one subkey being the regex, another being the common abbreviations it was to later test (including some not listed but that seemed plausible as well). An example would be the following snippet:

where the standard abbreviation would also be used in the tests when generated later.)

I'll take a look at the FOAF project link you indicated, to see if there seems to be anything there that might be of use, as well as look over your recommendations when I have neurons firing a little more in tune.

Ada Lovelace for the palindrome
Albert Einstein for having smelly feet
Alfred Nobel for his contribution to battlefield science
Burkhard Heim for providing the missing link between science and mysticism
Claude Shannnon for riding a unicycle at night at MIT
Donald Knuth for being such a great organist
Edward Teller for being the template for Dr. Strangelove
Edwin Hubble for pretending to be a pipe-smoking English gentleman
Erwin Schrödinger for cruelty to cats
Hedy Lamarr for weaponizing pianos
Hugh Everett for immortality, especially for cats
Isaac Newton for his occult studies
Kikunae Ikeda for discovering the secrets of soy sauce
Larry Wall for his website
Louis Camille Maillard for discovering why steaks taste good
Marie Curie for the shiny stuff
Nikola Tesla for the cool cars
Paul Dirac for speaking one word per hour when socializing
Richard Feynman for his bongo skills
Robert Oppenheimer for his in-depth knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita
Rusi P Taleyarkhan for Cold Fusion
Sigmund Freud for his Ménage ā trois
Theodor W Adorno for his contribution to the reception of jazz
Wilhelm Röntgen for the foundations of body scanners
Yulii Borisovich Khariton for the Tsar Bomba
Other (please explain why)